There’s been a lot of reporting on the rocky political relationship between former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). According to Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez’s camp needs to take partial blame for that characterization.

Pelosi attended Politico’s Sacramento Summit on Tuesday, chatting with senior political columnist Jonathan Martin about the current political landscape. There, Martin brought up Pelosi’s relationship with AOC, saying he’s “sort of curious about your view of her career.”

“Obviously, you had a bit of a rocky start at the outset, but you have a good relationship with her now,” Martin said. “Who does she remind you of, and how do you assess her trajectory in the House over the last eight years?”

“Well, that would be up to her,” Pelosi responded. “When she came, we didn’t have a rocky relationship. Press liked to say it that way, some of her folks — in fact, one of them ran for Congress in San Francisco and lost.”

“You just didn’t mention him, yeah,” Martin responded. You can see the full clip below.

Pelosi is seemingly referring to Saikat Chakrabarti, AOC’s former campaign manager and chief of staff. Chakrabarti went on to run for election to the House of Representatives in California’s 11th District in 2026, seeking the seat held by Pelosi, who announced in 2025 that she would not seek reelection. Democrats Connie Chan and Scott Wiener advanced to the general election, while Chakrabarti did not.

While Pelosi denied that there was a rocky relationship between herself and AOC, she went on to explain how her political outlook differs from Ocasio-Cortez’s more outwardly progressive platform.

“All we’re saying to folks: Look, this is a legislative place. It’s not a rally. If you have a rallying cry, take it to the rally, but don’t expect it to become the legislative agenda for people who represent completely different districts,” Pelosi said.

“She learned that, didn’t she?” Martin interjected.

“I say to them, ‘I have those signs in my basement from 30 years ago. All this stuff that you’re talking about, I have those signs in my basement. You want to come see my basement? I have those signs there. All this stuff,’” Pelosi continued. “But the fact is, that was appropriate for me to run for office on and the rest, but when it came to legislation, I didn’t say, ‘This is what I campaigned on, and so if you don’t agree with me, I’m coming after you.’”

Maggie Haberman brought her Trump administration expertise to MS NOW’s “Deadline: White House” on Tuesday to break down the new Washington Post bombshell that Donald Trump was smuggled off Air Force One in July to use attending White House press and members of his own staff as a decoy flight against an unnamed Iranian threat.

While the “Regime Change” co-author and New York Times journalist understood the federal government’s need to prioritize the president’s life over anyone else’s, by later gloating to that same press that “if I go, you go” during such threats, she said Trump undercut any trust built between the administration and the press that cover it.

“I’m getting threatened all the time,” Trump told press in an Air Force One clip aired on “Deadline: White House” Tuesday. “I’m No. 1 on their list, before you, but if I go, you go. So perhaps someday you want to change professions.” 

“They are always going to put the president’s safety first,” Haberman told host Nicolle Wallace. “What ends up happening is that the press and some of his own staff end up on the older Air Force One, which does have defensive capabilities, which certainly would be safer than the Qatari jet in that moment.”

The real issue came when the president wasn’t transparent with the press about the threat at hand.

“He could have said, ‘We had a concern, we had a threat, I was on a separate plane,’ he could have told reporters off the record, the White House could have told reporters off the record. None of that happened,” she said. “Instead, there is this gamesmanship where he is sort of taunting and saying, ‘If I go, you go,’ and that was not the case in that moment.

“Again, I want to stress, I understand the federal government is rightly going to be more worried about the president than it is anybody else, but there are tradeoffs, and that was one of them.”

Watch the full MS NOW segment below:

The flight from July’s NATO Summit in Turkey was previously the subject of New York Times reporting that found Trump’s new Air Force One jet gifted by Qatar lacked necessary defensive capabilities, which forced a shift to the old Air Force One after a detected assassination threat from Iran. That reporting led to Trump’s DOJ subpoenaing Times reporters for their sources, which were later dropped. The fact that Trump wasn’t even on that flight baffled Haberman further.

“Those subpoenas don’t exist anymore … I can’t say that I fully understand it,” she said.

“Maybe there is more here, clearly there is always a lot more that we don’t know when it comes to this particular government, but they are very good at creating these displays of openness … and in fact, it’s just a show,” Haberman continued. “It’s just a spectacle. They’re very good at keeping secrets when they want to, and this was one they tried to. But I don’t know if the secret they were attempting to keep was this or if they were just generally trying to intimidate from further reporting in general. We know that this president likes secrecy and does not like information getting out of his government unless he sanctions it.”

White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich shared Tuesday that she met with Trump White House officials after the decoy Air Force One flight to protect the president raised concerns over press safety.

The reports, first confirmed by the Washington Post on Monday, found that the president boarded Air Force One to leave the Turkey-held NATO Summit in July before covertly leaving in a catering truck to board another plane. Members of the press and some of the president’s own staff were unwittingly left behind on the old Air Force One amid an assassination threat from Iran.

“I emphasized that WHCA recognizes the paramount responsibility of the Secret Service to protect the president and that genuine security threats can require extraordinary measures, including circumstances in which operational security limits what can be shared with reporters in real time,” Heinrich, a journalist for Fox News, said in a Tuesday memo to WHCA members. “At the same time, I advocated strongly for the importance of maintaining independent press coverage of the president and an accurate historical record of his movements.”

Heinrich’s memo, shared by CNN journalist Brian Stelter, noted that she held a “candid and productive meeting with senior administration officials” on Tuesday afternoon, discussing the July incident. This conversation addressed concerns stemming from the Washington Post reporting, including “press safety, the ability of the pool to maintain an independent record of the president’s movements and the integrity and credibility of pooled reporting.”

“More broadly, I stressed that undermining confidence in the reliability of pool reports carries risks beyond any single incident,” Heinrich added. “In an already conspiratorial information environment, uncertainty about whether independent reporting can be trusted can be exploited by bad actors seeking to sow confusion and undermine confidence in journalism.”

You can view the full statement via Stelter below.

Heinrich went on to say she asked the White House to develop a protocol for future incidents, aiming to avoid threats to both press safety and credibility. The statement drew criticism online as people pointed to journalists being used as a “decoy target” in the plane switch operation.

“We went thru two big wars traveling into hot zones with VIPs knowing how to communicate threat risks and safety to each other,” said Kevin Baron on X. “War correspondents on the ground got better OPSEC.”